The First NextGen Bar Exam: What Actually Happened

2,624 people took the first administration of the NextGen UBE in late July 2026. In one state, 645 of them never got to start.

Here is the complete record, every claim labeled by how well it’s supported.

But For · practice for the NextGen bar exam

Exhibit · July 2026one mark per applicant

The counts and their sources are the report’s own. The 645 were Washington’s examinees; a smaller group testing with accommodations did finish.

Two rules govern everything But For publishes about exam administrations. First: experience, never content. Examinees are forbidden to reveal what the exam asked. No rule binds us the same way, and we hold ourselves to that line anyway: we don’t solicit, record, or repeat exam content. Second: every claim gets labeled. Official statements are marked as official. Press reports are marked with how many independent outlets carry them. Single reports are marked as single reports. Where we’re inferring, we say so. The first week of a new licensing exam is full of rumors. Someone should be the boring source that gets it right.

The administration by the numbers

The National Conference of Bar Examiners’ official statement gives the numbers: approximately 2,624 applicants were scheduled across 10 jurisdictions and 16 testing locations for the first NextGen UBE. The exam runs 9 hours over a day and a half, delivered on examinees’ laptops through NCBE’s secure platform at sites the jurisdictions manage. OFFICIAL NCBE’s chief communications officer gave the scheduled counts for the three biggest mainland jurisdictions: roughly 800 in Maryland, 700 in Washington, 650 in Missouri. OFFICIAL, via ABA Journal Day 2 finished with no new problems reported. OFFICIAL

Seven of the ten jurisdictions (Connecticut, Idaho, Oregon, and the Pacific jurisdictions among them) seem to have gone fine, as far as anyone has reported. OUR INFERENCE: nobody official and no news outlet has reported trouble there, which is not the same as proof that the day went perfectly.

Three jurisdictions had a harder Tuesday.

Washington: the exam that never began

The short version: Washington canceled its entire July bar exam. Apart from a small group testing with accommodations, nobody answered a single question.

Here is how the day went, put together from the Washington State Bar Association’s announcement, NCBE’s statement, and press reports that agree with each other:

Tuesday morning, 645 people were seated at the Yakima Convention & Event Center for Day 1 of the exam; that count is carried by three independent outlets. PRESS ×3 They never got to start. What followed was roughly five to six hours of attempted fixes, restarts, and waiting PRESS + examinee accounts, reported secondhand. NCBE calls the cause an on-site hardware and configuration issue. The venue itself, in a statement to local press, called it a “catastrophic equipment failure.” OFFICIAL, both By late afternoon, examinees were sent home. That evening, the WSBA said it wasn’t confident enough that the problem was fixed, so it canceled Wednesday, and with it the whole exam. Its announcement said plainly: “We sincerely apologize to the candidates who worked so hard to prepare.” OFFICIAL

One group was spared: roughly 30 to 40 examinees who test with accommodations, such as extra time, were on separate equipment, and they finished the exam. PRESS ×3 + WSBA communications office

Affected applicants pick from a set of options that has since grown. As this was first written, it was three: a make-up exam tentatively set for September 1–2, a move to the February 2027 exam, or withdrawal with a refund of the fees paid to the state. NCBE says it will handle its own technology fee separately. OFFICIAL Press reporting indicated a decision deadline of August 14. PRESS, single outlet on the deadline

Updated August 21, 2026. Washington’s page now offers a fourth choice to one group: applicants who registered in person in Yakima and had not previously failed a bar exam in a U.S. jurisdiction. They may accept a waiver of the bar exam requirement. The new admittee process begins October 9, 2026, the same day July results are released. The make-up exam is confirmed for September 1–2 at University of Washington Tacoma. The Board of Governors has also adopted a temporary “courtesy seating” policy, which lets those admitted by waiver take the exam in Washington in 2027 anyway and earn a portable NextGen score. OFFICIAL · WSBA, read August 21, 2026 Confirm dates and terms against WSBA’s own page for the July 2026 exam rather than any news account, including this one.

The institutional fallout began within a day. At least one Washington law school has publicly urged diploma privilege, admission to the bar without the exam, for the affected class, and asked the state supreme court for a transparent review. Press accounts describe early talk of litigation among examinees. PRESS, single outlets; developing, and we’ll follow it

Maryland and Missouri: disrupted, completed

The same Tuesday went the other way in two other jurisdictions. In Maryland, one testing site hit trouble for under an hour, and Day 1 finished on schedule. OFFICIAL In Missouri, network problems at the site delayed the start for many examinees. Testing picked up again the same day, and Wednesday’s schedule was changed to make up the time. OFFICIAL + local press

That contrast is the real story of the week. The exam and the platform were the same in all three places, and the only thing that changed was whether the local setup held.

Platform versus plumbing

NCBE’s central claim is worth reading closely, because the next two years of argument about this exam will be built on it. The claim is that the week’s failures were site-local: venue networks, on-site equipment, local setup. In NCBE’s words, they “did not involve the NextGen testing platform itself.” Where the local setup held, NCBE says, the platform performed as designed. OFFICIAL

Read fairly, the evidence fits that claim: seven jurisdictions ran clean, two recovered the same day, and the catastrophic failure traces to the venue, by the venue’s own account. Read from a chair in Yakima, the distinction is academic: if you couldn’t take the exam, it doesn’t matter whose equipment failed. Both readings are true, and an exam given on laptops in rented convention halls has to own the second one. California’s February 2025 disruption taught this same lesson once already. Washington taught it again, on day one of the exam that was supposed to be the fresh start. The real questions are about the system, not the software: who checks that a venue is ready, what backup is required, and who carries the risk when the room fails. Those are questions for supreme courts and bar associations, not just IT vendors. ANALYSIS: ours

What examinees are saying, and how to read it honestly

In week one, examinees were mostly talking about Washington’s canceled exam. The exam itself barely came up yet. CORROBORATED across platforms The talk about the exam will come. When it does, be careful with it, because week-one talk about a bar exam is unreliable for reasons worth naming:

No one has a score. The NextGen is scored on a 500 to 750 scale, and each jurisdiction sets its own passing line. Results will not exist for months, so every week-one claim about difficulty is a feeling measured against prep materials, not against how anyone actually did. OFFICIAL on the scale; the rest is our read

The first cohort has no baseline. There’s no earlier NextGen exam to compare this one to. “Harder than I expected” measures the expectations someone walked in with, and prep providers set those, ours included. So the first cohort’s impressions are worth reading and impossible to check.

Self-selection runs the room. The people most likely to post the night after a bar exam are the rattled and the triumphant. The quiet middle, most of the room, posts later or never. Any thread you read in week one is mostly the extremes.

Confidentiality keeps the specifics out. Examinees are not allowed to repeat what the exam asked. So the most detailed reports, the ones about the questions themselves, are exactly the ones that cannot and should not be shared. What examinees can share (pacing, fatigue, logistics, and how the interface behaved) tells you something real, but it arrives slowly.

So we’ll do this the slow way, in public. We are collecting firsthand accounts of the experience directly: logistics, pacing, how the format ran, never the content. If you took this exam, support@butfor.ai reaches a human who reads every message. When enough independent accounts line up into a real pattern, we write it up here, and the email list hears first. You’ll see how solid the evidence is behind each theme.

Here is what we’ll actually learn, and when. The September make-up, if it happens, is the second real test of how this exam gets delivered. It should show whether Washington was one bad venue or something wider. Jurisdictions will release the first results on their own schedules, which has historically meant months after the exam. And the first passing lines set on the new 500 to 750 scale will tell you more about this exam than any week-one thread. We’ll check each one against primary sources as it lands.

What this means if you’re taking it in 2027

The short version: wherever the room’s equipment held up, the exam ran as designed, and in one room it did not. So preparing for this exam now also means preparing for the room it’s given in. The affected Washington takers, meanwhile, face a genuinely hard choice among their three options: the September make-up, waiting for February, or a refund. Which one is right turns on how much law they’ll still remember, what it costs, and when they can start working. We’ve written the whole thing up as a separate report: how to weigh those three options, and what to ask your jurisdiction about the room you’ll test in. It also covers what week one changes about how to prepare, and what it doesn’t. It’s free by email at butfor.ai.

But For is an independent publication of Ink Forms Rivers, d/b/a But For, and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners or any bar examining authority. “NextGen UBE” is referenced solely to identify the examination. All information about the Washington administration is provided for context only; affected applicants should rely exclusively on official WSBA and NCBE communications for their options and deadlines.

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